Game 88: Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai, Datestones of Ryn, and Morloc's Tower (1979)

Exactly three years ago, a naive young CRPG player decided to start a blog. He had been encouraged by the subscribers of /r/gaming on Reddit, after he submitted a winning screenshot of Rogue, the second game he played in his epic quest to play every computer role-playing game ever released. Because he was already familiar with both DOS and the DOSBox emulator, he decided to restrict his adventures to that platform. Armed with Wikipedia's list, he boldly strode into the first dungeon that he was playing specifically for his blog, and he wrote a posting on a 1985 DOS compilation called The Temple of Apshai Trilogy, incorrectly tagging it as 1981.

He played the game for a single day, made a single posting, and moved on, an eager fire in his eyes. He figured by 2013 he'd be playing Baldur's Gate II, maybe Morrowind.

Oh, how I wish I could go back in time three years, bounce that tender youth on my knee, and explain a few things to him. I'd tell him:

• Wikipedia's list has like a tenth of all computer role-playing games released over the last 35 years. You really need to go to MobyGames, but even their list isn't really complete. Settle in for a long trip on this one, buckaroo.

• You're eventually going to come to regret your "DOS/PC-only" rule. You'll end up missing a ton of cool games, and you'll miss the best versions of the games that you do play. Your readers will tell you this from practically day one, but you won't listen because you never listen to anything. Also, you have this prejudice against the Apple II ever since you couldn't beat Agent USA in middle school. You need to get over that.

• But you'll mostly regret it because you'll come to see yourself as a CRPG historian as much as a CRPG Addict, and you'll realize there are a bunch of holes in your experience.

• The other emulators really aren't that hard. Look, I'll show you. This is called the Commodore PET. You can...hey, come back here!

After a few investment tips and a warning to go to New Orleans for only five days, not seven, in January 2013, I'd head back to the future, and this blog would be a very different place right now.

The Dunjonquest franchise was one that I screwed in my haste and ignorance. I just re-read the posting from February 15, 2010 (incidentally, I had five postings on my opening day; what the hell?), and it's embarrassingly awful. I barely covered the game at all. I had about six paragraphs and three screen shots, and I couldn't have invested more than two hours in it. But more important, in my ignorance I thought that The Temple of Apshai Trilogy was a compilation of all the Dunjonquest games to that date, which was wrong.

A screenshot from the DOS version I played in 2010.

 
Dunjonquest began with a bang in 1979, in a way that we hadn't seen yet with CRPGs. Remember that we're just at the beginning of commercial CRPGs. College kids had been playing them on PLATO and DEC mainframes for a few years, sure, and the Apple II and Commodore PET had supported a few primitive efforts. But now Automated Simulations (later Epyx) comes along and:

• Releases three games in one year using the same engine: Temple of Apshai, Morloc's Tower, and The Datestones of Ryn.

• Ports the games to multiple platforms. 1979 saw Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80 releases. In the coming years, Atari 8-bit, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64, and DOS releases would follow for certain titles.

• Introduces conventions not seen in CRPGs to date, including detailed room descriptions (kept in a separate manual), shops to buy equipment, an inn, and a detailed, well-written, framing story.

A bit of the introductory story from Apshai.

From what I can tell, it appears that Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai was the first 1979 release, followed by Datestones of Ryn and then Morloc's Tower. The next four years would bring seven other games in the Dunjonquest series, including two more Apshai games to round out the "trilogy" (Upper Reaches of Apshai and Curse of Ra); the Hellfire Warrior sub-series (Hellfire Warrior, Danger in Drindisti, and The Keys of Acheron), Sorcerer of Siva, and Gateway to Apshai. Moreover, the StarQuest duo (Star Warrior and Rescue at Rigel) use essentially the same engine, something I didn't realize when I panned Rescue at Rigel in 2010.

This was, in short, a series that deserved more than a few paragraphs written after playing the worst version, so I'm giving proper attention to the Apple II original.

Nonetheless, I'm not going to cover Temple of Apshai again here in detail. This is mostly because I haven't been able to get hold of a working version  (I can roll a character and enter the dungeon, but not save my progress or return to the inn). Suffice to say that you begin the game by creating your character--either randomly rolled or typed in by you (which of course invites some start-scumming). You go through a brief equipment purchase before being thrust into the first room of a three-level labyrinth with between 56 and 60 rooms each.

Character creation and equipment purchases in Temple of Apshai.

The gameplay isn't stellar. You move through an awkward system of rotating your character with the "L" and "R" keys and then typing a number representing the number of steps you want to travel. Occasionally, a monster appears and you can (A)ttack, (P)arry, or (T)hrust. Movement and attacking depletes your "fatigue," but waiting around restores it. Instead of hit points, you have a "wounds" score from 0% to 100%. Magic items are limited to healing salves and elixirs. There are secret doors to find along the walls and various (fixed) treasures to pick up in the dungeon's rooms.

My character in a Level 1 Apshai room. I have just discovered a secret door to my west. There is a treasure to my south. And I'm being attacked by a giant mosquito.

What makes the game unique and fun are the detailed room and item descriptions that appear in the accompanying manual. Long before the Gold Box series offered verbose journal entries for special encounters, Dunjonquest was doing it for every room. If you look at the screen shot above, you'll see that I'm in "Room No. 21" (even hallways are numbered as rooms). The book describes the area as:

The west wall of the cavern shows the marks of carving tools, but the rest is natural rock. The floor of the room is overgrown with mushrooms of two varieties. One has broad, flat caps and is white with brown splotches, while the second variety has black, tightly rounded caps.

The mushroom patch is the treasure that you see on the screen, and it has its own number and description in the manual. But most important, note that the room description above gives the key clue as to the existence of the secret door that I just found. This, in short, is a game meant to be played with the book in hand, and it is intended to mimic--as closely as possible given the technology of the time--the experience of exploring a tabletop RPG module. The authors say as much in a long introduction in the Temple of Apshai manual, noting that--and this remains true 34 years later--"while there are greater practical limitations to your actions than is usually the case in a non-computer RPG, there are still a large number of options to choose from."

In Temple of Apshai, you return frequently to the inn to rest, buy new items, and plan your next expedition. There is no "main quest" to the game, and I suppose the player simply chooses to end it when he's explored every corner of the dungeon or feels that his character has developed enough.

Morloc's Tower and The Datestones of Ryn are somewhat different. Epyx refers to them as "MicroQuests." They have the same engine, but no accompanying room descriptions (though it does have treasure descriptions).  You also can't set your own character: you play as Brian Hammerhand, a fighter with fixed attributes and equipment. You can't save the game or leave the dungeon as in Apshai; instead, the idea is to complete the entire dungeon in one expedition, which typically takes less than an hour--and, unlike Apshai, has an actual quest to complete: killing Rex the Reaver the Robber Baron and retrieving the "datestones" he stole from the Duchy of Ryn, and destroying the evil sorcerer Morloc. The game manual encourages you to replay the game multiple times, trying for a higher score or faster time.

Your uneditable PC for two Dungeonquest games. I love that a guy named "Hammerhand" carries a sword.

In both games, there is some randomness to the placement of treasures and monsters every time you start. Morloc has the player set a difficulty level from 1 to 3, making it one of the earliest CRPGs to offer this feature.

Both "MicroQuests" feature an involved story in the game manual that sets up the quest and gives some clues about what you might find, and how you might solve it. For instance, the manual for Morloc's Tower describes how Morloc consorts with "unnatural beasts and creatures inhuman," including a salamander that shoots fireballs. This is an enemy you encounter on the third level of the tower.

The salamander blows fireballs at me while I shoot arrows at him.

In a similar vein, the manual has one of the terrified villagers telling Brian Hammerhand that they once possessed a magic sword that told them when Morloc was near, "but it was taken from us to the tower...you may find it there." And indeed, on the fourth level of the tower is a magic sword that replaces your initial weapon and glows when you're close to Morloc and "flares" when you're in the same room as him.

But the lack of the detailed room descriptions and the inability to create your own character removes much of what was fun and RPG-like about Temple of Apshai, leaving only the interface, which is unforgivably annoying. The movement system might be the worst one I've ever experienced in a CRPG, forcing you to mince along in baby steps if you don't want to deplete your fatigue. Monsters appear randomly, sometimes in packs, even in rooms you've already cleared. Fighting them involves essentially no tactics, and you don't get any experience or rewards for doing it, so it soon becomes annoying.

Standing and exchanging blows with an ogre.

The "levels" of the "dunjons" fit entirely on a screen, so unlike as in Apshai, it's extremely easy to tell where there's a secret door. Despite this, the game makes you hit "(E)xamine" multiple times to find it. There's no visual indication of the stairs; you have to read the manual to know that they're always in the bottom-left corner. There's no way to pause the game at all, and since enemies can generate randomly right next to you and attack in real-time, you can't even take a bathroom break (let alone a blogging break) while playing.

Countering this is a fairly brisk pace; I was able to win Morloc's Tower in about 45 minutes (Datestones of Ryn had some emulator problems I couldn't solve). The major steps are:

1. Explore the dungeon and find the right treasures. There are several items in the tower that help defeat Morloc, including the magic sword, a glowing blue pyramid that stops him from teleporting out of the room, and a magic egg that incinerates everyone in the room for terrific damage. However, if you find an object called a "crystal tiara," it negates the power of the pyramid, meaning you have to chase Morloc around from room to room before you can kill him. The game doesn't tell you this anywhere; you have to learn it from experimentation or by reading the spoilers at the end of the manual. There are other rings and such that provide protection against fire and magic.

2. "(U)se" one of the treasures to tell you were Morloc currently is, and hie your way to that level and room.

A magic device tells me that Morloc is in Room 22.

3. Search the room until Morloc appears and then beat at him until he's dead. At this point, the game gives you a brief "win" screen, your score, and dumps you to a prompt. The score is based on the number of creatures you killed, how quickly you defeated Morloc, and the difficulty level you chose at the beginning.

Datestones of Ryn has even quicker gameplay--you're limited to 20 minutes on the timer--and the final score is based on how many stones you retrieved and how many enemies you killed.

A Datestones of Ryn screenshot for the Commodore 64.

As torturous as these games are to play today, they deserve credit for being the first commercial CRPGs to offer the kind of RPG experience that we've come to expect, and for trying hard, with the limited technologies of the time, to replicate the tabletop RPG dynamic. I don't know if Richard Garriott was ever exposed to these games, but you can see some Ultima-esque attention to back story and monster descriptions in the manuals, and of course the AD&D Gold Box series, starting with Pool of Radiance, would famously adopt the game/manual hybrid approach, though not with every room.
 

The game is credited to Jonathan Freeman and Jeffrey A. Johnson. Freeman was a co-founder of Automated Simulations, which became Epyx, but he left the company in 1981 and formed another company called "Free Fall Associates" with his wife, Anne Westfall. His departure essentially marked the end of Epyx's involvment in CRPGs; they would become more famous for sports games (Summer Games, Winter Games, California Games). Free Fall developed the Archon action game series and is technically still around, although with a web site so confusing that I couldn't find a valid e-mail address to try to contact Mr. Freeman.

Jeff Johnson, meanwhile, moved over to SSI sometime between 1982 and 1985 and worked on a host of CRPGs, including Wizard's Crown, Realms of Darkness, Rings of Zilfin, The Eternal Dagger, and Phantasie III. He moved to other companies and other genres, but today seems to be back in the RPG world at Atari, with credits on Dungeons and Dragons Online.

I may check out a couple of the other Dunjonquest games from 1980-1982 on different platforms, just to see how the series evolved.